Dell, Asus and Hewlett-Packard are busy launching new systems ahead of Computex and Intel is touting its latest greatest chips. The PC industry is also trying to bridge work and play and create hybrid devices that'll land customers.

Asus Transformer Book T300 is thin. Is that enough? Credit: Aloysius Low

Sound familiar? You bet it does. These launches could have been at CES. Or Computex last year. Or any conference or show in between. To wit:

If that sounds familiar, it's because the same basic design idea started with Lenovo's popular Yoga series (also available in an 11-inch model), and was later adopted by HP, Toshiba, and others, including an oddball flat-keyboard variant in the Dell XPS 11. Like the Yoga and its ilk, the Inspiron 11 is best seen as a good full-time laptop and decent part-time tablet.

Lenovo will also likely have some updated take on its Yoga franchise along with an armada of tablets and smartphones at Computex.

For Intel's part, the big message from Computex will be that it will do Android as well as Windows. Intel wants a slice of the Android tablet market. The PC industry will rally around Intel's cause.

In the end, the PC industry still looks like it's fishing for ideas. Microsoft's Surface 3 seems to have good positioning, realizes what it's aiming for (the MacBook Air) and a unique spin on the 2-in-1 device. The big question is how big this 2-in-1 market will really be.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CN...
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